ISTANBUL — Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed Kurdish rebel leader, on Saturday renewed a call for his fighters to disarm and end a long conflict with Turkey, hailing a “new era” in relations between Turks and Kurds.
Ocalan, who continues to exercise influence over Turkey’s Kurdish population from a prison on an island in the Sea of Marmara where he has been serving a life sentence since 1999, urged the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK, to hold a congress in the spring to end a Kurdish insurgency that has fractured society and claimed nearly 40,000 lives since the 1980s.
Museum-raid arrests
TUNIS, Tunisia — Tunisian authorities have arrested more than 20 suspected militants in a nationwide security crackdown since gunmen killed 23 people, mostly foreign tourists, in Wednesday's attack in the capital, the government said.
Hundreds of people gathered for a Mass in the cathedral in Tunis on Saturday, lighting candles to remember the victims.
Assassination plot foiled
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s intelligence agency said on Saturday it had foiled an attempt to assassinate Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum in the northerly Jawzjan province.
The assassination was to have been carried out by a suicide bomber who had hidden a bomb on the back of his horse as he attended a game of buzkashi, a national sport.
Talks focus on N. Korea
SEOUL, South Korea — In their first trilateral meeting in three years, the foreign ministers of South Korea, Japan and China recognized on Saturday the urgent need to stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, South Korean officials said.
South Korea’s Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se and his Chinese and Japanese counterparts, Wang Yi and Fumio Kishida, wrapped up a three-way meeting with a joint statement in which they said they would try to reopen six-nation talks aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons development.
Coke shipment seized
BOGOTA, Colombia — U.S. authorities confiscated a $180 million shipment of cocaine from Colombian drug traffickers aboard a boat on the Pacific Ocean bound for the United States, the Colombian attorney general's office said Saturday.
The Drug Enforcement Administration found 5.28 tons of the drug aboard the vessel, captured in international waters off Central America, said Alexandra Ladino, director of the attorney general’s specialized police force, which cooperated with the DEA on the operation.
Also in the world …
The U.S. Army Europe has deployed a Patriot missile defense battery near Warsaw, Poland, as part of joint exercises with Poland aimed at reassuring the NATO member in light of the conflict in neighboring Ukraine. … Tens of thousands of Georgians marched Saturday in the capital, Tbilisi, in one of the biggest anti-government rallies of recent years, blaming the authorities for economic crisis and worsening crime.